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In every area of practice, WilmerHale brings the insight, dedication to excellence, and commitment to client service needed for our clients to achieve their business objectives. Our five-department structure and team approach to service enable us to provide the highest level of responsiveness and access to lawyers with the most appropriate experience.

Colleges and universities have never been as prominent, or as vulnerable, as they are today. As their influence spreads, so does the scrutiny they receive. Educational institutions have unique missions, unique management and governance systems, and a unique set of responsibilities. Lawyers helping colleges and universities solve their thorniest problems must understand what they stand for and how they work. WilmerHale does.

We guide colleges and universities through government investigations, congressional inquiries, and public scrutiny. We represent our education clients in high-profile litigation, help them defend their intellectual property, and handle their major transactions. And we assist schools confronting difficult and contentious policy issues.

Issue Focus: Sexual Violence

WilmerHale is assisting some of the nation's top universities in their response to campus sexual violence, including schools identified by the Department of Education earlier this year. Our work covers the full breadth of this challenging issue. We counsel clients on compliance with Title IX, the Clery Act, and the Campus SaVE Act, as well as guidance from the Department of Education and the White House Task Force to Protect Students from Sexual Assault. We draft gender-based and sexual misconduct policies and procedures for resolving complaints and sanctioning responsible parties. We counsel clients on crisis response and help formulate internal and external communication strategies. We conduct internal reviews of university responses to specific incidents, and we recommend policy and practice changes when appropriate. We also represent clients facing Department of Education investigations, congressional oversight, law enforcement subpoenas, and lawsuits by alleged victims and respondents.

Experience

Strategic Response, Investigations and Litigation

Legal challenges confronting colleges and universities can quickly escalate into multidisciplinary matters with significant legal, financial and reputational consequences. We work with educational institutions to develop and execute strategies to defend or advance a position—whether responding to fast-moving events or working over the longer term to craft and implement legislative or regulatory solutions to complex problems.

We have represented numerous education clients in internal, regulatory and congressional investigations. These include investigations of universities' use of research funds, investigations of guaranteed student loan providers, and investigations of nonprofit and for-profit college recruiting and student aid practices.

We have also handled a wide range of offensive and defensive litigation for colleges and universities. In doing so we are mindful that educational institutions have numerous internal and external constituencies—including students, faculty, staff, alumni, donors and parents—that have differing interests and perspectives. We also take into account that litigation involving educational institutions attracts out-sized public attention and often concerns difficult and divisive public policy issues.

We represented Duke University in litigation by former lacrosse players.

We have prevailed in sensitive litigation over claims to art and antiquities in university and museum collections, including a dispute over Persian antiquities.

We represented a coalition of national universities accused by the Department of Justice of violating antitrust laws in providing scholarships.

We represented the University of Michigan before the United States Supreme Court in Gratz v. Bollinger and Grutter v. Bollinger, which addressed the ability of higher education institutions to consider racial and cultural background in admissions.

Intellectual Property

Intellectual property can be among an academic institution's most vital assets. To manage this important commodity, colleges and universities need an experienced and trusted partner. WilmerHale has one of the largest and most experienced intellectual property departments in the country. Our intellectual property lawyers assist schools with strategic planning, identify inventions for which patents should be sought and advise on what claims to make and how best to make them. WilmerHale's Intellectual Property Litigation Practice has been recognized by The American Lawyer as the finest in the country.

Representative matters:

We have prosecuted patents for universities, including Boston University, Brown University, Columbia University, Harvard University, Michigan State University, Rutgers University, University of Chicago, and University of Pittsburgh, and for medical facilities such as the Dana Farber Cancer Institute.

We advised Columbia University on the development of a strategic plan for the commercialization of a collection of patents. We analyzed and classified the technologies for marketing purposes, researched potential markets, identified possible licensees and delivered a comprehensive strategy far beyond the capability of most university technology transfer offices.

On behalf of a major university and its licensee, we prevailed in a patent interference proceeding concerning an active agent in a drug for the treatment of septic shock. The decision was upheld in an appeal before the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit.

Regulatory and Legislative

We are well-versed in the many regulatory obligations imposed on higher education institutions and for-profit education companies, and regularly provide advice on the areas of most pressing and consistent concern. We also represent numerous universities and educational companies before Congress, assuring that their interests are taken into account in legislation.

Representative matters:

We advise universities and commercial organizations on compliance with federal education laws.

We provide guidance to clients on the use of federal grant, cooperative agreement or contract funds.

We advise clients on the regulatory constraints surrounding research and product development in biotech, medical and other spheres, and on the increasingly regulated domain of data privacy.

University clients looking to export their technology turn to WilmerHale for advice on export controls pertaining to the transfer of technical data to overseas parties and the employment of foreign nationals—such as graduate students—in research conducted in the United States.

We helped ensure that federal stimulus funds would be directed to school systems that need to acquire certain instructional materials.

Transactional (Corporate and Licensing)

Universities and other education clients rely on us for a host of transactional work, including mergers and acquisitions, joint ventures, research collaboratives, technology transfers, and licensing. We understand the special challenges education clients face and the rules to which they may be subject when contemplating and executing transactions.

Representative matters:

We provide legal advice to university investment offices concerning their investments in various vehicles.

We represent a consortium of New York-based academic and medical institutions in matters including entity formation, governance and other corporate, tax, licensing, employment and regulatory matters.

We represented the Mexican National Institute for Astronomy, Optics and Electronics in a cross-border joint venture with the University of Massachusetts to construct a state-of-the-art large millimeter radio telescope observatory in Puebla, Mexico.

We advised on the formation and structuring of The SNP Consortium, a public-private consortium in which The Wellcome Trust, leading global pharmaceutical and IT companies, and several major research universities in the United States and Britain collaborated to develop a publicly released map of the human genome based on the discovery and classification of single-nucleotide polymorphisms.

We have represented major for-profit and nonprofit organizations in acquiring education oriented companies, such as Educational Testing Service's acquisitions of Assessment Training Institute and Prometric.

We represented some of the largest research universities in the country in customizing technology transfer agreements with private enterprises to their needs and particular technology requirements.

Publications & News

Bruce Manheim is quoted in this article published in Science magazine. The article describes how the use of digital DNA may be regulated by various nations under the Nagoya Protocol and may lead to allegations of biopiracy.

An article by Bruce Manheim, published in Nature Biotechnology, considers whether digital sequence information from genetic resources in foreign countries will be subject to the access and benefit-sharing requirements of the Nagoya Protocol and other international agreements.

An article by Bruce Manheim, published as a WilmerHale Client Alert and republished by Intellectual Property Watch, discusses the Nagoya Protocol and how over the past two years—as various nations have adopted new provider and user measures—the Protocol's legal framework has begun to coalesce into an international regulatory scheme governing access to and use of genetic resources for research and development.

A Law360 article by Jonathan Cedarbaum, Mark Rotenberg, Alexandra Bonneau and David Beraka discusses two areas in particular that have left universities facing FCA judgments and settlements in recent years: research funding and Medicare and Medicaid claims at university hospitals.

Over the past several months, many federal agencies have adopted rules significantly increasing the maximum civil monetary penalties (CMPs) they can potentially impose. The increased penalty amounts were adopted in response to recent legislation from Congress requiring that federal agencies make adjustments to “catch up” with inflation.

Civil fines across federal agencies have recently been increased dramatically under the Federal Civil Penalties Inflation Adjustment Act Improvements Act of 2015 (2015 Act) (Sec. 701 of Public Law 114-74), with some more than doubling. Companies violating the Hart-Scott-Rodino (HSR) Improvements Act, the Securities and Exchange Act, or the Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSHA), among others, could soon face civil monetary penalties that are up to 150% higher than the existing levels. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the 2015 Act would increase the federal government's revenue by $1.3 billion over the next ten years.

Chambers USA: America's Leading Lawyers for Business announced its final rankings for the 2016 edition, with WilmerHale ranking among the nation's best in 47 practice area categories. Chambers also ranked 82 WilmerHale lawyers as leaders in their respective fields.

Campuses across the country are wrestling with how free speech, tolerance, diversity and politics mix in a higher education environment. Recently, the Oversight Subcommittee of the House Ways and Means Committee examined the intersection of an institution's 501(c)(3) status and campus policies that regulate partisan political activity.

In this op-ed published in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Mark Rotenberg, a senior member of WilmerHale’s Education Practice, offers clients unique insight and experience gleaned from serving more than two decades as the chief legal officer at preeminent private and public research universities.

In every area of practice, WilmerHale brings the insight, dedication to excellence, and commitment to client service needed for our clients to achieve their business objectives. Our five-department structure and team approach to service enable us to provide the highest level of responsiveness and access to lawyers with the most appropriate experience.